Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The Metric

"A love-life life in finances. An unusual premise leads to an extraordinary and heart-wrenching short story. As readers, we are placed in the shoes of the narrator’s recently ex-partner and, in balancing the books on everything from electricity bills to drug habits, we are shown the wasteland of a life post disastrous relationship. Faced with the final sum, a cordial request to pay up, and the narrator’s less-than-thoughtful plans, we can take some small comfort from the title, at least. Baltis’s work is so practical and tragic as to be comic in its narrator’s surprisingly relatable quest to set a price on love."